Nakushita
by Thethuthinnang
Summary: He shouldn't drink as much as he does. Except drinking helps him forget, to empty his mind, and there's always so much, so much to forget.
1. Chapter 1

Disclaimer: Gokusen is the property of Kozueko Morimoto.

He knows he drinks too much.

"_Kanpai_! Again! _Kanpai_! One more!"

"Too much, _aniki_, too much!"

"Shut up! Where're your balls? One more!"

He's forty-years-old, nearly forty-one. This is no way for a man on the wrong side of thirty to be drinking. Only the younger ones, the live-ins or the low-rankers, drink like he does, or at least they do if they don't want to keep their liver past fifty. And, too, he was dry for three years in the tank, which doesn't bode well at all for his liver.

"Young Chief, please, think of your health!"

"I'm healthier than Wakamatsu is, Yasue-san! One more!"

He shouldn't drink as much as he does. He knows he shouldn't. It doesn't even really taste good anymore, and doesn't go down as easily as it used to. The burn isn't as welcoming, the hot flush of that light, drunken warmth not as enjoyable as it used to be. He supposes it's a side effect of getting old, of getting closer and closer to the big five-oh.

Except drinking helps him forget, to empty his mind, and there's always so much, so much to forget.

_A little girl hurries across a courtyard, fists raised and eyes determined._

_"Watch me, Kyo-san," she cries._


	2. Chapter 2

Disclaimer: Gokusen is the property of Kozueko Morimoto.

He knows he smokes too much.

He tried to quit, once, back when he was twenty-five. He managed it for nearly three years, until he went back into the system for a two stretch, and then he almost didn't have a choice but to pick it back up. When he came out, he tried to quit again, only there wasn't such a compelling reason to give it up anymore, and the habit stuck for good.

He smokes one, maybe two packs a day. He almost can't be found without a cigarette in his mouth. He doesn't really like the taste of it and he hates the way it makes him smell, which is why he wears too much cologne. He'd give it up, except smoking helps to distract him from things, other things, things that he doesn't ever want to think about or even remember exists, so really he smokes so that he can distract himself from thinking about how much he hates what's in his own head and think instead about how much he hates the smell and taste of cigarettes.

Two years ago, when he was thirty-eight, thirty-nine, he gave quitting one last shot. He tells himself he doesn't remember why, but really he does and just doesn't want to think about it. He made it three days before he hated himself enough to ask a stick and a light off of Wakamatsu.

Shinohara doesn't smoke. Neither does that brat, that Sawada boy.

So he lights up every single day and doesn't think about how much she hates the smell of smoke.

_A little girl takes a lit cigarette, crushes it out in an ashtray._

_"We shouldn't smoke, Kyo-san," she says, dark eyes large and grave. "It's bad for us." She makes a face. "And it smells."_


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: Gokusen is the property of Kozueko Morimoto.

He knows he's too careless with women.

"Ah! Ooshima Young Chief!"

"Ooshima-san! Come in, come in!"

"Young Chief, it's been too long!"

They simper and giggle. They sigh and coo. They crawl up his arms and touch his neck and whisper lewd suggestions into his ears.

Trash. There are nicer terms to use, politer phrases, but what they all really come down to is trash. Not the hostesses, real hostesses like Yasue-san who couldn't imagine doing what these street-side girls do, but the walkers, the tramps, the floozies who go up and down the red light districts all night long. The ones who work longer hours on their backs than on their feet. All trash, whether imported or recruited. His _kumi_ doesn't get involved in stuff like this, it doesn't have anything to do with the girls. Their matrilineal tradition would make it too awkward. They're incompatible.

He doesn't like trash. Never did. But he still goes to them, still turns to them, no matter how much he dislikes it, because trash is the farthest, the absolute farthest he can get from the feminine ideal he carries around in his head like a blazing star, an ideal he's had in his head for sixteen years and that he knows he can never, ever have, and he wants so badly to forget it that he'll deliberately and consciously consort with women who are in every way, shape, and manner the exact opposite of what he thinks a true woman worth a man's devotion ought to be.

So they cling and they whisper and they rub and they kiss, and he takes it all and acts a fool for these women because for sixteen years he's had to try his hardest, his utmost, to convince himself that this is what he wants and there is nothing else for a man like him.

_A young girl, nearly a young woman, adjusts her schoolbag over her shoulder._

_"I don't need boys," she says breezily. "I've got Kyo-san. That's much better than boys or chocolates."_


	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer: Gokusen is the property of Kozueko Morimoto.

He gambles too much.

He knows he shouldn't. There are other things he could be spending his money on, and at the least he could be saving it for his old age, which is creeping closer and closer every day. He doesn't want to end up a senior trying to live off of the _kumi_, even if he has served well and faithfully for forty years.

He doesn't even particularly enjoy it. Oh, it used to be entertaining, when he was younger and rasher, more heedless, with no horizon in sight and the hot rush of risk and chance thrumming through his veins, back when it was easier to lose himself in the thrills of wins and losses, of the enticing possibilities of knife fights.

But these days, the excitement is gone. He's lost his taste for it. Now he gambles out of habit and because he doesn't want to think about what he'd actually like to spend the money on. He doesn't like having it in his wallet, doesn't like the possibilities it represents.

He doesn't like looking at a thing and having the first thought that comes into his mind be _I bet she would like that._

So he spends his money on foolish and frivolous nonsense, because it's better than standing there with a walletful of bills thinking about things he can't buy with it.

_A young girl looks at the tortoiseshell _kanzashi_ she holds in her hand, and then, eyes wide, looks up._

_"Kyo-san," she says, voice faint with shock. "How did you know?"_


	5. Chapter 5

Disclaimer: Gokusen is the property of Kozueko Morimoto.

He is too violent.

He knows this. He knows that he is just as famous among the different _kumi_ for his fists and his _dosu_ as he is for his temper. Even in a notoriously ill-humored stratum of society, he is considered extreme, practically fatal to irritate or offend in anyway.

He is the only one in his household with a body count.

He tells himself that it does not bother him. And, really, it doesn't. He is _Yakuza—_this is a part of the world that he has worked so hard, so diligently, to rise in. Besides, most of the people he's killed were also Yakuza, and the few exceptions were people even worse than that, so his conscience is quiet.

What he hates is how it changed her.

He should have said no. He should have refused when she asked, should have sent her to her grandfather where she could have learned how to deal with things without the use of violence. He should have followed his first instinct, should have shaken his head and apologized and spoken instead to the _kaicho_. He should have turned her away, even if she threatened to dislike or hate him, should have done the right thing no matter how she'd begged.

But he hadn't. He hadn't said no. He'd said yes, _Yes_, had given into her. He'd said yes, which was all he ever seemed capable of saying to her, which was all he was _still_ ever capable of saying to her.

He'd taught her to fight. He'd shown her everything he knew, every maneuver and dirty trick he'd ever used or heard of, had imparted to her his own science of violence, the only thing in which he'd ever shown any particular talent or aptitude. He'd given her everything, everything he knew, because he could not refuse her.

He'd taught her to be free of him.

He hadn't realized it at the time. Young and stupid, he'd been both. All he'd seen then were her shining eyes, her smiling face, all he'd known then had been the relief and joy of being able to take her mind off of the death of her parents. And of course this was years before he would even begin to start realizing what had happened to him, what was still happening to him, what kind of a terrible and unendurable trap had caught him in its teeth, years and years before he'd even felt the jaws closing in on him. A young man trying to be father, mother, and brother all at once to a poor, orphaned child, and of course it wasn't possible for him to have foreseen anything to come, for a twenty-four-year-old punk to understand how cruel a hand fate had dealt him the moment that child came to stand, dark-eyed and black-dressed, in front of him. There was nothing he could have done, nothing he could have comprehended in time to save himself.

But that doesn't stop him from regretting.

Regretting that he taught her anything. That he even showed her how to make a fist. That he should teach her, so early on, so quickly, the means with which to make him obsolete, years before he would even understand that he had done so.

Regretting that, by his own actions, by his own enthusiastic teachings, he had taken away from himself the only tool in his possession by which he could be useful to her, by which he could have somehow, in even that shallow, weak way, bound himself to her.

Regretting that he's made her strong enough not to need anyone, not to have to depend on anyone.

Not to need _him_.

And he wonders when he became so pathetic that he's been reduced to wishing she didn't know how to fight, because that would be at least one way in which he could stay useful, stay necessary, could make a reason to remain near her, to go on protecting to her, to be, at least, at the very, very least, in a position where he could watch her, could know that she occasionally, even if only passingly, thinks of him.

Because seventeen years is long enough for even Ooshima Kyotaro to realize, understand, and accept that the child he taught to throw a punch, the little girl who threw out his cigarettes, the girl who turned up her nose at boys and chocolates, the young woman for whom he once bought a traditional hair ornament, the child who is now a woman—

—is someone he can never, ever have, is someone who is destined for far greater things than an aging gangster who drinks too much and smokes too much and fights too much and womanizes too much—

—that this woman, this young, beautiful woman whom he watched grow from a child to a girl to a woman with whom he has helplessly, inescapably, _stupidly_ fallen in love—

—is completely, irrevocably, and forever out of his reach.

_A little girl holds out her little finger._

_"Kyo-san," she says, "when I'm grown up, I promise I'll marry you."_

_"_Ojou_! Please don't talk so thoughtlessly!"_

_"I mean it, Kyo-san," she protests, stretching out her arm. "I have to! I need you too much!"_

_Before he can pull back, she catches his hand and curls her little finger around his._

_"Now we've promised," she says, giving him a warning look. "You can't back out!"_

_"_Ojou_," he says, trying not to grin at such a cute, childish thing. "_Ojou_, that's not how it works. An _ojou_ can't marry a useless live-in. By the time you're ready for that, you won't want an old man like me anymore."_

_"Don't worry, Kyo-san," she says, smiling up at him. "You are Kyo-san, and I don't care how old you get."_

_Her tiny finger tightens around his._

_"I promise, Kyo-san," says Kumiko, "I promise I'll need you forever."_


End file.
